The president of the International Criminal Court told reporters on Wednesday she is facing “unreasonable inconvenience and threat” after U.S. sanctions froze her assets as part of the Trump administration’s continued effort to target the intergovernmental organization.
President Donald Trump ramped up his opposition to the ICC in February 2025 by announcing sanctions on the court for engaging in “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Despite the complicated and recently sour relationship between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president has remained committed to his moves challenging the court’s authority.
ICC President Tomoko Akane, a Japanese prosecutor who assumed the office in 2024, last week joined a growing list of ICC members that have been hit with penalties, which include blocking their funds and preventing them from entering the U.S. The Japanese national appealed to her home country to engage with the U.S. and “defend ICC and the rule of law in the global society” at a news conference she joined virtually.
She said she has faced a number of measures intended to make her life more difficult, including the cancellation of her credit cards. Despite this, she vowed to press on with her work.
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“ICC will never be defeated,” she said, according to a translation by The Associated Press. “Justice will and should prevail.”
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi backed Akane and the ICC this week, saying Tuesday that Japan “must protect this important institution” because the country is the largest financial contributor to ICC.
But Trump’s efforts to dismantle and target members of the ICC — which prosecutes serious international offenses like war crimes and genocide — stretch back into his first term. In June 2020, Trump issued an executive order that sanctioned the ICC for investigating U.S. actions in Afghanistan, though the policy was later revoked under President Joe Biden’s administration.
The U.S. is not part of the international treaty that established the ICC, called the Rome Statute, so Trump contends that the country should not be subject to the court’s jurisdiction.
The State Department announced in July that it is leading the charge to “systematically dismantle” the decades-old international judicial body. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called the ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court” and argued that the body had overstepped in its enforcement efforts.
The Trump administration has called on other nations to join the U.S.’s push to dismantle the ICC. Several African countries such as Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have announced their intention to withdraw from the ICC since Trump returned to office last year.
“Our whole of government campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to national sovereignty will be sweeping and we expect more countries to join our campaign by ending their funding and participation in this politicized and unaccountable court,” Rubio wrote in a press release announcing the sanctions on Akane last week.
Israel, which initially signed on to the ICC’s governing treaty but never formally adopted it, has been increasingly critical of the ICC in recent years.
Netanyahu praised the U.S. for issuing new sanctions on the ICC in a post on X, referring to the intergovernmental body as “a kangaroo court that cloaks its abuse of power in the language of international law.”
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